I apologize for the absence. I had an irate publisher banging on my door & had to finish something for him. OK, what’s going on?
Just reading back through posts here:
- Ben Stein: I’m still a bit sad about Ben. I really used to like his American Spectator diaries back in the 1970s. Business-wise, I don’t think he’ll recover — he surely doesn’t deserve to — from those clips of him debating Peter Schiff that have been going around, Schiff right on pretty much every point, Stein wrong, wrong, wrong. And I must say, this whole business of Jews cozying up to fundamentalist Christians just strikes me as creepy and, well … transparent. What would their grandparents say?
- Did I see the name “Walter Olson” attached to a letter in The Economist recently, or was that a fig newton of my imagination?
- Gods of the Copybook Headings: Please go to this one on my spiffy new site, not that one on my crappy old site. I’m trying to get everything ported over so I can close down the old site, but it’s going at about the same speed as the conversion of minority voters to the Republican ticket.
- Inaugural oath: “So help me God” is just a flowery & traditional way to say “I really, really mean it.” I say it myself. To get rid of these things, you need to utterly overhaul the language, Nineteen Eighty-Four-style. Hands up anyone who really wants to do that? I thought not.
- Our content: Pass. And to hell with all these demands that we embark on some sort of system-building project. This is a blog, not Plato’s frickin’ Academy. I’m here mainly so I won’t annoy my religious colleagues over at NRO, so a typical Bradlaugh post on Secular Right will be something that would’ve ticked off Kathy Lopez. If that doesn’t suit you, don’t read ’em. This is blogging, the internet equivalent of sitting in a pub passing comments as the world goes by.
On the religion-and-society front, a pal in Australia sent me this.
Many ordinary Australians share the belief that religious faith is an indicator of morality, and it is accepted wisdom that high rates of religious practice correlate with lower rates of crime, promiscuity and abortion.
However, a study published in the Journal of Religion and Society, an American academic journal, set out to test this hypothesis and found there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and public health and social stability. The study, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy using data from the International Social Survey Program, Gallup and other research bodies.
“In general,” writes the author, Gregory Paul, “higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”
This is stuff we’ve kicked around here on the site, but it’s interesting to see a formal study done. Interesting, too, to know that it’s being argued Down Under.
Apropos nothing much at all, the expression “Down Under” always brings to mind two things: (1) The joke traditional in English Panto where a ribald emcee introduces some Australian act with [broad wink] “He’s very big Down Under.” (2) The sentence that used to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records (but apparently no longer is), as ending with the most possible consecutive prepositions. There’s a reference here:
The incumbent record was a sentence put into the mouth of a boy who didn’t want to be read excerpts from a book about Australia as a bedtime story: “What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of about ‘Down Under’ up for?”
Mark Brader (msb@sq.com — all this is to the best of his recollection; he didn’t save the letter, and doesn’t have access to the British editions) wrote to Guinness, asking:
“What did you say that the sentence with the most prepositions at the end was ‘What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of about “Down Under” up for?’ for? The preceding sentence has one more.”
Norris McWhirter replied, promising to include this improvement in the next British edition; but actually it seems that Guinness, no doubt eventually realizing that this could be done recursively, dropped the category.
Inaugural oath: “So help me God” is just a flowery & traditional way to say “I really, really mean it.” I say it myself. To get rid of these things, you need to utterly overhaul the language, Nineteen Eighty-Four-style. Hands up anyone who really wants to do that? I thought not.
You know, I thought about hauling out the 1984 reference in the prior thread, but afraid it would have been too Godwinesque. On second thought, it is correct, because even if we’re not applying the brutal means of Oceania, it still comes to the same stupefying end. Interestingly enough, Orwell brought this out when he had a character discussing his bowdlerization of Kipling.
I just saw the video of Neil Cavuto featuring Ben Stein vs. Peter Schiff dated from August of ’07. Ben Stein got it so wrong its not even funny. I don’t know about Stein’s political views. However, if they are as out the window as his economic and investment predictions were, how can anyone take him seriously?
1) Link changed on Gods of the Copybook Headings. Also inserted a title on this post.
2) I have not had a letter published recently in the Economist, but I am of course not the only Walter Olson. The one with whom I’m most frequently confused is a former Commerce Department official and expert on election law who, like me, has contributed right-of-center op-eds to the WSJ (they once sent me a check for a piece he wrote them, but I was a gentleman and sent it back).
Great metaphor. Fair enough; I, for one, will loosen up and try not to take it as seriously as the content of the “What is the Secular Right?” tab had led me to do. Perhaps your metaphor there, or at least in the FAQ, would keep new visitors from being disappointed or chagrined. Then, you might also reconsider and allow a fundie to wonder through the pub door occasionally just for the sport. 🙂 ◄Dave►
Gregory Paul describes his paper as a “first, brief look” at the issue. Fair enough.
The paper is here and here.
How Derb ever came enamored of the Ben Stein Diaries in The American Spectator (which a long time ago used to be funny, even ribald) is beyond me. Stein rambled on about motor trips around Santa Monica but most of all about his oh so cute son (I forget his nickname–but it was cloying to the max).
As for the point about this not being “Plato’s frickin’Academy,” I’m now a convert. We’re all in a pub enjoying a beer and saying whatever comes to mind.
I’m just glad that NRO has two resident secularists now, with Derb and Andrew Stuttaford, but I’m afraid that adding the execrable Mary Eberstadt to the staff has cancelled them both out. K-Lo is a freakin freethinker by comparison.
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Bradlaugh says:
And I must say, this whole business of Jews cozying up to fundamentalist Christians just strikes me as creepy and, well … transparent. What would their grandparents say?
I vaguely recall Stein saying that he had converted to Christianity in a FOX News interview a few years back when promoting one of his books. Don’t expect that much co-operation between religious Jews and Christian fundamentalists on any issue other than Zionism.
Heather still gets play on NRO. (Kathleen Parker–don’t know how secular she is–also is let out of the punishment cell from time to time).
On a personal note: I was a guest on the recent NR Post-Election Cruise. Seeing an opportunity to approach Mother Superior KLopez, I did so and suggested that fund raising might be enhanced by bringing back the very tee shirt I was wearing, emblazoned with a quote from Derb: “Like any true reactionary, I loathe the New York Times.” She looked at me as if I was somewhere between irrelevant and in-the-way. I can’t say I expected a different reaction from this career scold.
“[T]hey once sent me a check for a piece he wrote them, but I was a gentleman and sent it back.”
There is a much more seasoned writer named “Jonathan Rowe” with whom I am often confused. He’s a hard leftist on economic issues. I was recently in touch with him about the confusion.
I once submitted a piece to a magazine on religious liberty, got paid $400 or so for it. And then they never published it (without explanation) because I think they thought I was the “other” Jonathan Rowe.
I think ‘Down Under’ is being used as a noun, in that sentence. So I don’t think it’s fair.